Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of collaborative computing and more particularly to scheduling e-meetings in a collaborative computing environment.
Description of the Related Art
Individuals worldwide can converge over a communications network to share ideas, documents, sound and images without needing to be in the same room. Technology facilitates this through multipoint audio conferencing, video conferencing over traditional networks, and many forms of conferencing over the Internet. A substantial collection of technologies and protocols has been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video, and data over the single digital communications medium of the Internet.
An e-meeting represents one popular form of electronic collaboration. In an e-meeting, participants can view a common space, for instance a whiteboard or a shared application (or both), through which ideas can be exchanged. The viewing of the common space can be complemented with a teleconference, a videoconference, an instant messaging session, or any combination thereof, such that the meeting can act as a near substitute for an in-person meeting in a conference room.
Collaborators who participate in e-meetings often maintain a personal schedule managed by a scheduling system. Collaborators can schedule e-meetings within the personal schedule sua sponte, or the collaborators can schedule e-meetings responsive to the receipt of an invitation. An invitation typically contains data regarding the e-meeting such as a topic, list of invitees, and most importantly, a date, time and online location for the e-meeting. Using this data, the invitee can be prompted either to accept or decline the invitation. Oftentimes, the acceptance or declination of an invitation can be accomplished with a single user action such as a mouse click.
Once an e-meeting has been scheduled and the selected participants notified, prior to the scheduled occurrence of the e-meeting one or more e-meeting confirmations can be issued to the selected participants who have accepted the originally issued invitation. Traditionally, an e-meeting confirmation is an e-mail reminder provided by the e-meeting organizer and transmitted manually to the selected participants. Of course, the successful transmission of an e-meeting confirmation depends entirely upon the e-meeting organizer remembering to draft and send the e-meeting confirmation.
Different e-meetings can have different resource requirements. Basic e-meetings require nothing more than a basic Web browser of any form in a simple computing device enjoying network access to the e-meeting server. More advanced e-meetings may involve the processing of imagery or data necessitating minimum processor power in the computing device, minimum bandwidth with respect to connectivity, or a minimum display capability including a particular browser type. The most sophisticated of e-meetings can require audio-visual support including a web cam and a microphone to capture both audio and video of the participant to the e-meeting.
Generally, at the time of distributing invites to an e-meeting, little notice is provided in connection with the resource requirements of the computing infrastructure of the invitee. While some resource requirements can be inferred from the invite itself, it remains incumbent upon the recipient of the invite to confirm the availability of the requisite resources to properly participate in the e-meeting. Alas, it remains common that substantial time and effort is wasted at the outset of an e-meeting while participants scramble to determine whether or not the requisite resources to conduct the e-meeting are available to all participants.